Networks, Interaction and Emerging Identities in Fennoscandia and Beyond

International Conference in Tromsø, Norway October 13th-16th 2009

The North has traditionally been viewed as a marginal zone whose hunting and gathering populations are often portrayed as the passive recipients of technological developments dispersing from the South via local adoption and/or population migrations.

More recently, many northern regions have been drawn into modern political states, with the result that scholarly debate has tended to reflect national research traditions which focus on the emergence of ethnic groups and identities. As a result, the present day cultural diversity of the North is understood from a categorical perspective.

Together, the shared emphasis on northern marginality and crisp group-based identities has increasingly come to obscure our understanding of the active roles played by northern communities in long-term historical transformations.

This international conference will bring together leading archaeologists, historians, ethnohistorians and linguists who seek to understand the long-term history of the North from a networking perspective, focusing not on the archaeological or historical reconstruction of nominal groups and cultural boundaries but on the changing characteristics of form, content and long-term interaction and exchange within and between northern communities.

This meeting concludes the Early Networking in Northern Fennoscandia project, which has examined the long-term resilience of fennoscandian hunter-gatherers as they have interacted with neighbouring societies. The conference will showcase the results and approaches developed by the CAS project, but also aims to provide scope for discussing how similar approaches might be applied to the study of hunter-gatherer communities in other geographic settings and historical contexts.

We will be publishing conference papers in the peer-reviewed International Publication series of the Finno-Ugrian Society (http://www.sgr.fi/english/index.html).

Organizers:
Professor Charlotte Damm (CAS) and Dr. Marianne Skandfer (CAS and LARM), University of Tromsø
Charlotte.damm@sv.uit.no
Marianne.skandfer@tmu.uit.no

Sessions:
1. Networking perspectives on Northern Hunter-Gatherer Life-ways
2. Forager-herder-farmer encounters: tracking the character of emerging multicultural interactions across the Northern World
3. Dynamics of language, materiality and social life in interaction and multicultural networking
4. Networks, Northern Communities and Emerging States


Structure of conference
Tuesday 13.10
Evening opening lecture by Prof. Marek Zvelebil, University of Sheffield, UK followed by reception

Wednesday 14.10
Full sessions

Thursday 15.10
Full sessions

Friday 16.10
Optional excursion in the vicinity of Tromsø